Social researching: Academia-specific networking websites offer new, efficient ways for scholars to connect, share works
By Lucas Bensley
May 10, 2012 12:07 a.m.
In the past few years, academia-specific social networking websites have grown in popularity among faculty members at universities across the United States.
These websites, including Academia.edu, Zotero.org and several others, offer new and efficient ways for scholars and students to share research and find colleagues who share their interests. Similar to Facebook and Twitter, these websites allow academics to follow updates in colleagues’ work and research while sharing their own.
While a majority of students and faculty may place more faith in sharing work through academic journals and other tried-and-true peer reviews, the time efficiency offered by digital publishing on growing academic social networks may entice more users to join in the future.
Some might be concerned that edits made to papers shared online tend to have less depth than those made in academic journals.
Yet in spite of apparent shortfalls in the quality of digital publishing, the open communication and socialization offered by these new websites retain promise for students searching for potential peers and newer research in their fields of interests.
Academia.edu alone has more than 1.3 million users, 3,685 of whom are affiliated with UCLA.
Christine Borgman, the presidential chair and a professor of information studies, is one of many professors at UCLA who have used these websites in their courses.
Borgman said students in one of her advanced graduate seminars participate in a Zotero group to pool their works as a group and to track one another’s research interests.
The use of these websites by faculty members and students, however, does not counteract the risks of using social networking websites. With general social networks like Facebook, the ability to share personal or professional information does not include the ability to choose who has access to that information.
This concern for privacy, however, is not an essential issue for academic websites, as content posted by users is typically related to their studies and set in a more professional tone than might be expected on more general interest networking websites such as Facebook. Furthermore, this content is usually only viewed by faculty and students in the same field.
To allow students and faculty search for prospective peers, websites like Academia.edu also allow users to follow the accounts of other users through subscriptions in the same way Twitter does.
“(On Academia.edu) I can stay in touch with people in real time … and see who has been following me,” said John Richardson, a professor in information studies.
Other competing websites, such as Mendeley, are especially proficient for managing and sharing entire research papers as they can automatically retrieve bibliographic information for articles they cited. Such functions can serve to reduce the workloads of researchers and improve the quality of the papers they publish on the same websites.
Papers that had to undergo lengthy reviews by journals or other scholars by offline means can now receive real-time reviews and comments on these websites, allowing for immediate corrections and much more efficiency.
Users who prefer to use traditional methods of peer review, such as submitting work through academic journals, may still do so, as these offline methods still remain the norm in academic circles.
“The past methods of going to conferences and going through journals remain essential,” Borgman said.
But it is safe to say that any stereotype of scholars being secluded and introverted in small cliques will be discredited with the increased sharing of information and broader communication offered by social media.
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